Monday, 27 February 2012

Gosh, doesn’t time fly when you’re
not updating your blog? I’ve been busy drawing, both sketching out new characters
(see here) and working on the final illustrations for Dan and the Dead. My new
blog banner is a spin off from that, if you’re curious.

Anyway, after so much writing
over the last year, it feels good to go back to mostly drawing. And once again
I’m struck by one enormous difference between the two activities.

I need silence to write. If
possible, I also need to be alone in the house. There’s absolutely no question
of listening to music. The only sound should be the scrape of dry fingertips on
the keyboard and the steady drip drip drip of blood as it sweats out of my
forehead (it’s probably just as well I’m on my own).

Drawing, on the other hand, is
next to impossible for me if I don’t
have music. And if you want to phone me while I’m sketching, then fine, go
ahead -- I can hold the phone in my left hand and chunter for hours while my
right hand carries on. In fact, just pop round. You can stay and listen to the
radio with me, to this and this and this, and then we can chat as the coffee-break
kettle steams and hopefully agree that the one thing that really puts the ‘great’
in Great Britain is the wonderful, inestimable, sanity-saving BBC. I’m sure
they had illustrators in mind when they invented it.

The phrase ‘back to the drawing
board’ normally has negative connotations. But not for me:-)

Wednesday, 1 February 2012

I have been thinking a lot about
time travel lately. This isn’t surprising, given that I’ve just written a book in
which the characters can visit their younger selves -- and their ancestors --
in the form of ghosts. What would you do, if you could do that? And what would I
say if I got the chance to haunt myself at the beginning of my efforts to write
fiction? Apart from ‘boo!’ that is.

I remember that beginning quite
clearly -- it was the start of 2005, a year and a half after I’d moved to France. I was
house-sitting alone for a couple of weeks, trying to meet an illustration
deadline and walking someone else’s dog.
On those daily tramps through the woods, I came to realise that not only
did I have a whole novel-sized story rattling around in my head, I was also no
longer afraid to try writing it down.

Now that I am on the point of
seeing my first book reach print (not the book mentioned above, naturally), I can
look back over the whole experience and draw some conclusions. So, as a
time-travelling ghost, what writing/crafting/story-telling tips would I give my
younger self when I appear before him in the woods? Before my younger self
passes out from shock, I think I could get across at least five:

1 – Storytelling trumps
everything.

…especially when you are writing
for a young readership. And I mean everything. It’s more important than
historical (or contemporary) accuracy, more important than the things you worry
you should be writing about, and
certainly more important than the demands of your ego. People NEED good stories. Just be grateful for the chance to supply them.

2 – Don’t aspire to be a great writer,
aspire to be a great story-teller.

…and don’t call it ‘writing’, call it ‘work’.
Above all, don’t aspire to be a writor (with an ‘o’). Writors (with an ‘o’) are
poncy people who ‘commune with their muse’ and complain about wine. Instead, go
into the ring bare knuckled, and don’t come out till your book is lying
face-down in the blood and sawdust. That’s the work. Now you can drink the wine.

…even if it doesn’t come
naturally. You don’t have to stick to the plan, just give yourself a clear
sense of what you’re aiming for. Trying to make up a complicated plot as you go
is a bit like brick-laying in the dark. You wouldn’t build a house that way, so
why do it to build a world?